Finborough, London
Bart and Alun Owen’s 1964 musical about a Liverpudlian dockside prostitute and her sailor beau gets a foot-stamping first professional revival
The working-class British musical sounds like a contradiction in terms. It did once exist, however, and this show, with music and lyrics by Lionel Bart and a book by Alun Owen, was a popular example of the genre. Revived professionally for the first time since 1964, it inevitably seems a period piece but it survives through the vim and vigour of Matthew Iliffe’s production.
It would be easy to poke fun at the show’s romanticism. Pat Casey, son of a socialist martyr, returns to Liverpool from a life at sea to find that his old flame, Maggie May, has become a dockside doxy. Their passion is rekindled but Casey puts it on hold to lead his fellow dockers in a strike and then sabotage a cargo of guns intended for a foreign oppressor. The show is palpably enthralled by its hero – always referred to by his surname – and Maggie, who at one point hymns “a pair of slippers by the fireside”, comes perilously close to the cliche of the tart with a heart.
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